Open Science Foundation Scholar-in-Residence

The School congratulates PhD Candidate Felix Singleton Thorn on obtaining an Open Science Foundation Scholar-in-Residence.

Felix will be spending over a month in Charlottesville, Virginia from late May, primarily to work on an evaluation of the concordance between pre-registrations and published papers which have received Open Science Pre-registered badges. This project is one of several ongoing collaborative efforts between the meta-research group at the University of Melbourne (led by Dr Fiona Fidler) and the Centre for Open Science.

Felix's PhD research, supervised by Dr Paul Dudgeon and Dr Fiona Fidler, explores how researchers in psychological science plan their experiments, with a focus on how best to balance the practical difficulties of research on human participants with the requirements for making strong inferences about noisy systems. There is a sophisticated research literature providing methods to estimate the statistical requirements (e.g., sample size and measurement reliability) for making strong inferences in various inferential paradigms, and yet formal approaches to investigating these questions appear to be rarely used among working scientists. Felix's research examines why this is the case, with the goal of developing practical tools or policy which might help researchers ensure that that the research we perform is likely to provide interpretable evidence.

His research, especially with its focus on practicable solutions, naturally led to the development of collaborative projects with the Center for Open Science, who have spearheaded efforts such as Open Science Badges (now being awarded by over 30 academic journals), registered reports as a publication format (now offered by over 70 journals), and the Open Science Framework (now the most commonly used pre-registration and data repository among psychology researchers).